Feb 1, 2006 at 20:51 o\clock

I’m fed up of stepping on the scales every morning and seeing it flash either 12st 9lbs or 12st 9.5lbs – I want to see a new bloody number!

At the weekend when the scales showed 12st 7.5lbs and 12st 8lbs I thought I’d left the realms of the 9s behind me for ever, but yesterday and today I was back up there at 12st 9lbs – which means that my weight hasn’t budged at all since the middle of December.

What’s all that about?

Why the fuck does my body just refuse to play by the laws of physics? Create a deficit between the calories you consume and the amount you burn, and you WILL lose weight, right? Isn’t that what the experts tell us?

So why isn’t it quite that straightforward and predictable?

Every day I write down every morsel (of food or drink, heh) that I put in my mouth. I never cheat. I never lie. I weigh and measure almost everything, and keep a close eye on my portion sizes. I keep my calories between 1200 and 1400 per day. I’m back on the exercise bandwagon, and for the past fortnight I’ve done some form of cardio work for at least 40 minutes a day, and some form of resistance work (crunches, press-ups, weights) at least 3 times a week.

I follow my own bespoke high fibre, low-fat, medium-proteins-and-carbs diet, making sure I eat plenty of fruit, veggies and whole grains as well as lean protein and complex carbs. I never add salt to my cooking or to my food. When I snack, it’s on fruit, unsalted nuts (weighed and measured), pumpkin and sunflower seeds (ditto with the weighing and measuring), and (very occasionally) 70% cocoa-solids bitter plain chocolate (two tiny squares only). I drink at least 2 litres of water a day, and only a couple of cups of tea or coffee.

I hardly ever indulge in ‘empty’ foods that offer no nutritional benefit. Everything I eat is chosen because it helps me reach daily goals – it’s high in fibre or protein or calcium, it’s crammed with vitamins, it’s low in fat, it contains anti-oxidants etc. Balancing all the requirements feels like a full-time job sometimes – it’s all so damn complicated, and for once it would be lovely just to eat something unthinkingly, without worrying about bloody targets all the time.

I’m being so damn good it hurts!

So what the fuck am I doing wrong?

I’ve decided it’s time to try something radical. I’ve had a good hard think about the kind of lifestyle I want to lead when I get to goal, and I’ve realised that I don’t want to have to live on supermodel rations or exercise like an Olympian in order to maintain a healthy BMI. That just seems way too restrictive a lifestyle to maintain for the rest of my life.

So, since I don’t want to have to survive on 1200 calories a day or take up marathon running, I think it’s important that I don’t do anything foolish at this critical stage to fuck up my metabolism even more than I’ve done already.

I have this theory (it may be crackpot, but what the hell, it’s MY theory) that if you starve yourself to get thin, you have to continue starving yourself to stay thin. I think that your body adapts to the harsher regimen, and eventually becomes so maladjusted that it will gain weight on what anyone else would consider a normal-to-low daily calorie allowance. And once that maladjustment’s happened, I reckon that it’s difficult-to-impossible to reverse.

I’ve decided that even if drastically reducing my calorie intake for a few days would probably catapult me off this plateau, in the long run it would probably be counter-productive.

Soooooo, I’ve decided to be daring and reckless, and to try a completely different approach.

From today, I’m raising my calories to between 1500 and 1600 each day. I’m going to eat a lot more protein and a little more fat, and I’m going to make sure that I have at least one pot of yoghurt every day (because I read somewhere that yoghurt actively aids fat burning).

It doesn’t sound particularly radical in comparison to what I’m doing already, but mentally it feels radical, because my natural inclination is to do the opposite and cut my calories to try and provoke a loss. Raising my intake makes me feel daring and impetuous. It’s thrilling to be such a rebel.

Heh, what a sad person I must be.

I’ll try it for a week and then take stock. If I’ve lost weight, I’ll report back the happy news. IfI’ve gained weight or stayed the same I probably won’t report back, because by then the scales will have driven me insane, and I’ll be rocking in the corner of a padded cell somewhere.

Comments for this entry:

PastaQ wrote at Feb 1, 2006 at 21:43 o\clock:I wouldn\'t be surprised if you find that eating a little more helps you lose weight. If you consume too few calories, your body shifts into famine mode and slows down your metabolism. If you eat a bit more you might be able to convince your body that there is, in fact, plenty of food around and it\'s ok to use those fat cells.

I have a question. Why do British people measure weight in stones? Americans don\'t do this and it\'s always confused me, especially since a stone is 14 pounds which is such an odd number. (Well, it\'s an even number, but it\'s a weird number.)

Fatslayer wrote at Feb 1, 2006 at 22:09 o\clock:I have no idea why we do this, but it\'s something we\'re all used to over here. In the UK if someone says their weight is 70kg or 154lbs they\'re likely to get a puzzled look, but if they said they were \'11 stones\' everyone would immediately know what they were talking about. We visualise in stones and pounds, and converting to kg or plain lbs tends to confuse us!

So each stone contains 14lbs, and our weighing scales tell us our weight in stones and lbs (eg. 11st 3lbs, 10 stone 13lbs etc). Only the more expensive sets of scales allow you to press a button and convert to kg.

Only folks like me, who blog and browse fat message boards where most of the members are Americans, can convert easily to just pounds - but it takes practise!

We switched to metric about 35 years ago and all the youngsters are bi-lingual in metric and imperial, but for anyone over the age of 35 their default \'language\' is stones and pounds.

I know...we\'re weird! It\'s what makes us so endearing...heh heh.

YP1 wrote at Feb 1, 2006 at 22:44 o\clock:And what\'s wrong with marathon running?! Seriously though, that sounds like a good plan, constantly cutting calories and upping activity just isn\'t sustainable. And I\'m not sure I\'m entirely bilingual in metric and imperial, I wasn\'t until I started weighing and measuring myself and my food, but I\'m now using both because it gives me more milestones to aim for!

dietgirl wrote at Feb 2, 2006 at 16:31 o\clock:have you noticed any non-scale changes? clothes or whatnot? sometimes the scales take longer to show up the changes. especially if the batteries are f*cked, as i discovered mine were once, but only after a month of me screaming at them... moron!

good luck with the upped intake! you have been working so freaking hard, you deserve some goddamn numerical proof!

Kirsten2 wrote at Feb 3, 2006 at 12:06 o\clock:I can think in stones or pounds, but not simultaneously. When I\'m converting, I always have to think \"Well, 10 stone is 140 pounds, so 162 pounds is, let\'s see, eleven stone eight\". This may be because I\'m not that good at mental arithmetic.

And I definitely don\'t think in kilos, despite D-Girl\'s best efforts. All the treadmills at my gym recently converted to metric without any warning, and I had to go away and find out what my weight was in kilos. (It irritates me slightly, because you can only input whole numbers of kilos, and a pound here or there makes quite a psychological difference to me. I don\'t think I have the patience for kilos.

I do, however, think in grams when I\'m cooking, but this is so rare as to be statistically insignificant.

PastaQ wrote at Feb 3, 2006 at 19:25 o\clock:Thanks for the stones explanation! As far as converting, I find it handy that google will convert measurements for you right through the search field. So if you search for \"11 stones 8 pounds to kilograms\" it pops up the result at the top of page. It does this for everything, from teaspoons to grams to hectares.

Fatslayer wrote at Feb 4, 2006 at 10:15 o\clock:PQ can have my firstborn too - I had no idea that Google did that! Clever Google, have a gold star!

hopefulloser wrote at Feb 4, 2006 at 20:03 o\clock:Fatslayer I am going through the very same thing! I\'m with Marla, if you have success I will be indebted to you eternally.

Thanks PQ for directing me here! You are brilliant :-)

hopefulloser wrote at Feb 4, 2006 at 20:04 o\clock:Fatslayer I am going through the very same thing! I\'m with Marla, if you have success I will be indebted to you eternally.

Thanks PQ for directing me here! You are brilliant :-)

hopefulloser wrote at Feb 4, 2006 at 20:05 o\clock:Fatslayer I am going through the very same thing! I\'m with Marla, if you have success I will be indebted to you eternally.